


The Tall Man

by Puzzled



Category: The Dresden Files - Jim Butcher
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-27
Updated: 2016-08-26
Packaged: 2018-08-11 06:31:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,854
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7880167
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Puzzled/pseuds/Puzzled
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Harry Dresden thought the hardest parts of his life were behind him. He had a greystone, a good job and a girlfriend, but black magic has a way of sticking around. Disappearances, werewolves and the mysterious ThreeEye are the least of his problems as bodies struck by lightning keep piling up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Tall Man

It was a long walk to the payphone and every step of it I regretted leaving Chicago. Once I got there, resolutely ignoring the stares of the few other pedestrians in Nowheresville Iowa, I realized that one of the tears in my coat had gone straight through to my jeans, and any coins I’d had were spilled across two miles of muddy ditches and sidewalks. Luckily my wallet was secure in its customary position.  
  
I was able to persuade the pimpled cashier to ignore the slashes and blood on me to break a twenty. I could have bought something to get change, but after the week I’d had I wanted nothing more to do with the place. Having to endure more remnants of the town as part of me for however long it took to expurgate the molecules of food would be intolerable. Instead I dropped two quarters into the payphone and tried to stay as calm as possible.  
  
“Elaine?” Through the static present in every long distance call I was able to almost immediately realize that she wasn’t on the other end. If she had been I’d have heard more dramatic hisses and spitting rather than her secretary politely informing me that Elaine was meeting with a client for the afternoon. I thanked her and hung up, the phone finally giving up the ghost with a blaring busy signal as I walked away.  
  
The motel wasn’t anything special, although I’d made friends with the desk clerks because my keycard only worked twice at best. I understood the appeal for the workers, but I would very much have preferred a simple physical key. The girl on duty managed a smile as she tried not to stare at me, I must have looked worse than I thought, and handed me a new plastic rectangle.  
  
“Were there any messages for me?” I was sure there weren’t, if Elaine had really wanted to get in touch with me she would have, but there were other people I tried to be available to. Granted, most of them would have found other ways to contact me, but apparently part of being an adult was reading your mail and returning phone calls. Most of the time I had other people for that, but the price of the occasional adventure was responsibility. In any case there weren’t any and I managed to stagger my way up to my room which opened on the fifth swipe of the card.  
  
Naturally it was just as I got into the shower that I felt the pulse of my sending stone. For a brief moment I considered blowing it off, but I had just been congratulating myself on my maturity. With a sigh that didn’t fully capture my soul crushing regret I ventured back into the near arctic not steaming air of the room and picked up the chunk of obsidian.  
  
As the world went black around me I started to go over what had happened. Elaine’s half strangled laugh brought me up short though.  
  
“Really Harry?’ She seemed to be standing just across from me, the only other thing in the darkness surrounding us besides our circles. “You couldn’t put on pants first?” I only raised an eyebrow, then deliberately gave her a once over. She was dressed professionally of course, her dark blazer contrasting with her golden hair. The only thing that distinguished her from thousands of other worker bees, besides her unmatched beauty, was the truly excessive amount of jewelry she wore, all of it sparking with barely constrained power.  
  
“You know I can’t wait to see you.” She grinned at that, before immediately trying to hide it. We’d been together forever, and part of her still liked my more adolescent flirting. Or at least I thought so, no matter how much she rolled her eyes when I told others. “How are things back home?”  
  
“Busy of course, and when you get back there’s some things you should probably look at.” I didn’t quite like the sound of that, if there was something she wasn’t comfortable with it could be a very real issue. “That can wait though, how did it go? Any complications?”  
  
I twisted a little, showing off the long shallow cut that had robbed me of my pocket. “Nothing too serious, but Anog Ite was every bit as unpleasant as myths said.”  
  
“And Wiyohiyanpa? Did you get his agreement?” The Lakota spirit had been the whole reason I’d made the trip west, and it had taken a bit more work than I’d hoped to speak with him.  
  
“That’s how I met his mother, his price for his assistance was settling a debt of hers. He didn’t really seem to concerned about the whole deal, I got the feeling that the task was more of a formality than anything.” It had been a weird experience on the whole, when I agreed to help Elaine with her business I didn’t really expect to be dealing with near gods and creatures from mythology. I didn’t want to know how she’d managed to convince an energy company to hire her to locate an ideal site for a wind farm, but since I’d managed to get a promise out of the being responsible for the east wind, or at least the east wind in Iowa, it didn’t matter.  
  
It was probably her master’s fault, after Ebenezer had shown up to save the day from Justin we’d been split up. I’d spent a few years in the Ozarks, but she had gone to an elderly wizard who had decided that arcane power was no excuse not to be comfortable. When we finished our don’t use black magic remediation courses our interests were a little different, which was only natural, but we had stayed together. She’d managed to get a degree while I did my apprenticeship with Nick Angel, and when we were done we set up a business. Well really she did, I had been planning on doing the whole Sam Spade thing, but Elaine thought a little bigger.  
  
“Mallory Analytics” was what she called it, a nice vague name that told people approximately nothing about what we did. She was the face, the brains, the attractive body, and I did most of the leg work. Her teacher had given her some contacts, and together we managed to build a bit of a reputation. We found things, no matter what, no matter how abstract. Between that and the occasional case I took on the side for pittances we were doing well for ourselves, certainly better than two orphans who were nearly enslaved by a warlock had any right to expect.  
  
“Weird. So you’ll be back tomorrow sometime then?” I thought about it for a second, then shook my head.  
  
“Nah, I’m sick of this place. I’m just going to take a shower and start driving. It’ll only be six hours or so.”  
  
“In your car?” Her mocking tone showed she still didn’t understand the bond between a man and his beetle, “I think taking twice as long as Gilligan is probably a good estimate.”  
  
“Thanks Eunice. See you tonight.” That got a real smile out of her as she waved and broke the connection.  
  
The shower was every bit as good as I imagined it would be.  
  


__

  
  
The drive had been nine hours of miserable traffic. The radio never really worked and I-80 was sufficiently boring as a road that it should give up and try being a soporific. I won the license plate game just shy of Davenport, but it wasn’t quite the same without any competition. The kids in the SUV I kept pace with for a hundred miles didn’t seem like the sort to play along anyways. I somehow made it home before falling asleep, and in what would have hugely offended a younger me I wasn’t even annoyed that Elaine hadn’t stayed up. I managed to brush my teeth before falling into our bed, hoping that she’d be up for a late morning.  
  
I was tired enough that I barely stirred when she woke up, and was only slightly more coherent when she gave me a kiss before leaving. I lay in bed as the sun finished rising and reflected on the perils of dating my boss. We worked well together, but it would have been nice if we could have both slacked off simultaneously without worrying about who would answer the phone.  
  
Eventually I dragged myself out of bed and managed to make myself look vaguely human. Breakfast sounded like a great idea, but I had a feeling that there wouldn’t be anything in the icebox. Elaine hated cooking, and if I wasn’t around she would have gotten takeout for every meal. Considering I spent a week in the middle of nowhere battling Canotila I doubted there was any food in the house at all. When we had bought the greystone we had both been excited about the actual icebox built into the kitchen. The previous owners had thought it added character, but we had wanted it for more practical reasons. If I’d known then how little we’d use it I would have pushed harder for a different spot, one with more space. Oh well, hindsight was 20/20.  
  
It was a nice morning, winter was coming to an end but the sky was a deep blue and the breeze off the lake was crisp. The café on the corner did a great breakfast sandwich and I half-heartedly leafed through the papers as I waited for mine to finish. The Cubs were starting spring training and claiming that this was the year, Elaine and I’d met the spirit behind the curse and I felt confident it wasn’t. Politics wasn’t worth looking at, and the comparison of portable music players was the last thing I wanted to read. I’d shorted out some poor fellow’s the last summer when I’d called up a breeze after running and realized that it was another thing I’d never get to play with. I had a faint hope that I’d be alive long enough for the sign of wizardry to shift, but until then I’d just settle for being thought a Luddite.  
  
I wandered home as I ate the sandwich and tried to figure out how long I could justify hanging around before going in to work. I was thinking at least until lunch before I remembered that Elaine had mentioned that there was something she wanted me to look at.  
  
It probably wasn’t too important, especially if she hadn’t woken me or called me back from Iowa, but I didn’t want to take the chance. Our lifestyle was nice, I enjoyed the chance to be paid well to do magical research I’d happily do free, but Ebenezer had always told me that magic was meant for more. I had a powerful gift, and I needed to use it, call it the tao of Peter Parker. Lawyers and industrialists would be fine if I took a day off, doing the right thing would be a good way to get back into the swing of things.


End file.
